Photo: clarkmaxwell, Flickr Creative Commons
A couple of observations at this point in the experiment:
- It's weird cheering for a team that is expected to be good. A record of 2-1-1 isn't great, but the team was without its starting goalie to start the season. They actually went and found some random amateur goalie to fill in at practice at one point. 2-1-1 is also pretty good by hockey standards. Last year Pittsburgh had the most wins in the NHL. They only won 49 of 82 games. That's like a 9- or 10-win NFL team. It's a winning record but not much of one. Hockey results seem to involve a lot more luck than most sports.
- Fandom isn't coming naturally yet. In most games I feel mild excitement and hope at the right moments and seem to naturally want them to win, although it's not to the level I felt with the Thrashers. When the 'Hawks win it's more like "That's nice." I'm hoping to eventually get it to a "Woohoo!" The sheer number of games in an NHL season will prevent my emotional investment in any single game from reaching anywhere near that I feel with the handful of games played by Georgia Tech or the Atlanta Falcons, but it should be more than this.
- The first regular season game I watched the 'Hawks play was against the Winnipeg Jets, the team that used to be the Atlanta Thrashers. There were several points, hearing names I knew and used to cheer for, when I actually cheered for the wrong team. It's hard to quit Byfuglien, but I'll try. At least Hossa used to play for the Thrashers and I liked him then.
Also, how did more goalies not die before they started wearing helmets and masks?
4 comments:
I always felt that way about players that were traded. You always want to root for them and you forget it easily.
THANK YOU for thinking you shouldn't watch TV live. Matt is insistent that he can't watch it on TiVo and I think that it is perfectly legitimate for us to skip the first half and then catch up by the end since we can fast forward through commercials.
I am innately superstitious. If I forget to wear the right shirt or start the game early enough and they lose I blame myself. Luckily, I don't take my superstition seriously, so I can suck it up, wait 45 minutes for college football games or an hour for NFL games and watch it on delay. Hockey games I can just watch the next day. I'll often use the time I'm waiting to start the game to go run or something.
If the pre-mask goalies didn't die often, they surely at least were hideously disfigured.
They were hideously disfigured, Courtney. Ever see Jason sans mask?
I've never tried to watch recorded sports, but I imagine it loses something just knowing that the outcome has already been decided. Then again, if I can get used to the idea we could dispense with our TV service entirely.
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